Brighton’s trolleybus era was short but memorable

Like so many of the UK’s trolleybus systems, Brighton’s had a short life. The decision to close it came only 17 years after the first lines opened and five years after the last new trolleys arrived. Diesel double-deckers replaced the last of them within five years of that fateful vote.

This picture from the book, taken by Malcolm Keeping, shows one of Brighton Corporation’s 1939 AEC trolleybuses passing beneath complex overhead as it climbs a snow-covered Carden Hill through the Hollingbury estate on a section of route opened in 1949.

None of that can detract from the fondness that many enthusiasts — Mervyn Stedman among them — developed for these electric vehicles, or from the memories they cherish today of them accelerating powerfully, yet quietly up the many hills of what then was a town and today is a city. While the energy that powered them was generated in a coalfired power station that doubtless created its own emission problem, in Stedman’s words the impression at the point of delivery was of buses that were clean and odourless.